RES 5530: Race, Class, and Gender in Literacy Research (Spring 2009)

"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone."- Ralph Waldo Emerson
As I read chapter three this week I floated between two worlds. The world I was reading about and my own childhood histories. Every few sentences, Deborah Hicks related a scenario or memory that I connected with and was transported back in time immediately to my youth. I stress building connection with my students as they enter a novel, yet this connection was different. I was knit to the experiences shared this week. "We never engage in cultural practices as sponges, simply appropriating cultural meanings or being positioned in power relations. Rather, learning also entails small, and at times imperceptible, moments of shading, valuing, and imaginative reconstruction. Those small moments and histories are as critical to a theory of learning as what we might descibe as socialization or positioning in discourses." WOW! I am the result of a long series of small moments that may have appeared insignificant to others, but now have constructed my outlook and beliefs about learning and life. I remember distinctly the stern Italian voice of my third grade teacher who called my handwriting chicken scratch in front of the entire class. I remember the shame and emabarrassment that lasted for such a long time, I would practice my handwriting endlessly in secret to avoid a situation as unpleasant as that encounter. I remember the same teacher's klip klop of ther Italian leather slide shoes as they approached my desk unsure if I would be the recipient of praise or condemnation. These are just a few of the particulars of my narrative that have shaped my life and the teacher I have become. I think almost effortlessly we translate these small moments into vows of what we will and won't repeat or become. We are not only teaching the reading of books in our classrooms, but the reading of lives, of situations, of behaviors. What we do expose our students to in books contributes to their histoy, such as this book is contributing to mine. We are fluidly taking what we read in a book and inserting it into our individual narratives or personal histories. They are stored in there waiting for a moment to escape onto a page as a fictional piece, poem, reflection, or conversation topic. That is the moment our histories are knit together in shared experiences, ideas, and thoughts. These are the stones we are bringing that contribute to the city of language. We are operating in a construction zone, each one of us assisting in the assembling of something bigger and greater than we are, yet our individual histories form its foundation.
Stefoni Shaw